Recently, a renewed international interest in Russia as a world political actor has emerged. Against this background, it is useful to better understand how international relations and foreign affairs are studied in Russia and how future Russian political actors, diplomatic personnel, ministerial bureaucrats, business managers, area experts, and other officials, activists, or researchers are taught for their work on the international arena. What are the theories, approaches, and schools tha...

Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that attributes corruption to the allegedly ongoin...

A quarter century after the formation of the Popular Front and a decade since joining the EU, processes of state- and nation-building in Latvia are still on-going. Issues such as citizenship, language policy, minority rights, democratic legitimacy, economic stability, and security all remain objects of vigorous public discussion. The current situation also reflects longer-standing debates on the relationship between state, nation, and sovereignty in Latvian society and polity. By examining...

On March 14, 2022, Marina Ovsyannikova raised a banner on the main evening news of Russian television with the inscription "Stop the war. Don't believe the propaganda." in English. She was immediately taken to the police station where various investigators interrogated her for almost a day. Working in the international newsroom, Marina Ovsyannikova has long known that the Kremlin was constantly lying to the Russian people.The war in Ukraine became a point of no return for her—it was...

Reformers had high hopes that the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would lead to significant improvements in legal institutions and the role of law in public administration. However, the cumulative experience of 25 years of legal change since communism has been mixed, marked by achievements and failures, advances and moves backward. This book—written by a team of socio-legal scholars—probes the nuances of this process and starts the process to explain them. It...

Mythical carnivores that prey on humans…and the researchers who study them.New graduate student Jordan begins her first field expedition to study Italy's legendary animals, under the supervision of her mentor Gabriela. But being on the frontlines of discovery with these mysterious, dangerous animals comes with risks. Will Jordan learn to survive the local Roman monsters? Or will she join the countless others who've lost their lives to this unexplained legendary inf...

What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation’s Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, she shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter ...

The book explores the dynamic intersections between trauma, gender and ecology issues within contemporary Slavic literatures, offering a critical lens through which cultural upheavals of post-communist spaces are examined. Through close readings of prose, poetry, and hybrid literary forms, the volume investigates how narratives from Russia, Poland and Croatia engage with the legacies of violence, displacement and ecological degradation. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from trauma s...

Recently, a renewed international interest in Russia as a world political actor has emerged. Against this background, it is useful to better understand how international relations and foreign affairs are studied in Russia and how future Russian political actors, diplomatic personnel, ministerial bureaucrats, business managers, area experts, and other officials, activists, or researchers are taught for their work on the international arena. What are the theories, approaches, and schools tha...

Recently, a renewed international interest in Russia as a world political actor has emerged. Against this background, it is useful to better understand how international relations and foreign affairs are studied in Russia and how future Russian political actors, diplomatic personnel, ministerial bureaucrats, business managers, area experts, and other officials, activists, or researchers are taught for their work on the international arena. What are the theories, approaches, and schools tha...

On a bitterly cold night in January of 1979, the heiress to the Sheraton Hotel fortune vanished without a trace. This is the true story of Marcia Moore—daring author, yoga teacher, astrologer, and occultist. She experimented with the psychotropic anesthetic ketamine, in the same vein as Timothy Leary’s consciousness-expanding research with LSD. Her interest in psychedelics has only added to the wild theories about Moore’s mysterious death in the four decades since.Psychics, astrolo...

This book illuminates and explores the representation of women in Soviet cinema from the late 1950s, through the 1960s, and into the 1970s, a period when Soviet culture shifted away, to varying degrees, from the well-established conventions of socialist realism. Covering films about working class women, rural and urban women, and women from the intelligentsia, it probes various cinematic genres and approaches to film aesthetics, while it also highlights how Soviet cinema depicted the ambig...